T. Boyle - Talk Talk

“Don't give me that crap. I've got the past-due deadbeat bills right here in front of me. You understand what I'm saying? Eight hundred twenty-two dollars and sixteen cents. FedEx. Five p. m. tomorrow. This is no game, let me assure you of that.”

“Okay, okay.” He was watching Dana, her brow furrowed in concentration, the red pencil dancing-she was oblivious to the whole thing. On the screen, the monster was back, the camera gave a sudden jerk, and there was blood everywhere. “Listen, this is probably a mistake-she's just been the victim of identity theft-and if you would just send the bill so we can iron things out-”

“Who am I talking to?”

“This is her boyfriend.”

“Boyfriend? You're telling me you're not Dana Halter? Then why in Christ's name did you say you were?”

“But I didn't-”

“You put her on right this minute, you hear me? I mean “now!” You think this is some kind of joke here? You think I'm a clown? Put her on or I'll have your ass too-for, for-“obstruction!””

“I can't.”

“What do you mean 'you can't'?”

“She's deaf.”

There was a pause. Then the voice came back, harsher, louder, a theatrical bray of outrage and puffed-up sanctimony. “I thought I'd heard it all, but you got balls, you really do. What do you think, I'm stupid here? We're talking fraud, felonies, we are going to take legal action-”

“Wait, wait, wait”-an inchoate idea had begun to form in Bridger's head-“can you just tell me what the number is, the number on the account? I mean, the number of the phone itself?”

The voice was exhausted, exasperated, drenched with contempt. “You don't know your own phone number?”

“Just give it to me.”

Heavy irony, the world-weary sigh of disgust: “Four-one-five…”

As soon as he had the number, the instant the man on the other end of the line gave up the last digit, Bridger shouted “Check's in the mail!” and pulled the phone cable out of the wall. Then, his heart pounding with the audacity-the balls, yes-of what he was about to do, he glanced over his shoulder to make sure Dana was still at her desk, still bent over the papers with a red pencil and a wondering frown, before he pulled his cell from his pocket and dialed the number. There was the distant faintly echoing hum of the connection being made, of the satellite revolving in the sunstruck void, and then the click of the talk button and a man's voice saying, “Hello?”

“YEAH, HI. Is this Dana?”

They were announcing a special over the loudspeakers-“Attention, Smart-Mart shoppers, we're having a blue-light special in the housewares department, our superdeluxe model three-speed blender for only thirty-nine ninety-five while supplies last”-and the clamor distracted him. Plus, Madison was hanging on his left arm like a side of beef, totally sugared-out, her hair in her face, a smudge of chocolate on her chin, chanting “I want, I want, I want,” and where was Natalia? “Hold on,” he said into the phone, “I can't hear you.”

He gave the place a quick scan, the phone in one hand, Madison occupying the other, the usual chaos prevailing-kids running wild, fat people shoving carts piled high with crap up and down the aisles as if it were some sort of competition or exercise regimen, heads, backs, shoulders, bellies, buttocks, a stink of artificial butter flavoring and hot dogs grilled to jerky-and then he found a small oasis of calm in the lee of the menswear department and put the phone to his ear again. “Yeah? Hello?”

“Dana?”

“Yeah. Who's this?”

There was the briefest tic of hesitation, and then the voice on the other end of the line began to flow like verbal diarrhea: “It's Rick, I just wanted to hook up on that thing we were talking about the other day-”

He didn't recognize the voice. He didn't know any Rick. Madison pinched her tone to a sugar-fed falsetto: “I want Henrietta Horsie. Please. Please, Dana, please?”

“Rick who?”

“James, Rick James. You know, from the bar the other night? The one on, what was the name of that street?”

That was when everything went still, the loudspeakers muted, Madison moving her mouth and nothing coming out, the bare-legged kids charging silently up and down the aisles and even the babies with their purple-rage faces stalled right there in mid-shriek. He felt sick. Felt as if someone had taken a shank and opened him up. And he was trembling, actually trembling, when he clicked the off button and slid the phone down inside the Hanes display case.

His first thought was to find Natalia and get her out of there, to get in the car and make scarce, but he fought it down. It was nothing-or no, it was something, definitely something, something bad-but there was no need to panic. So they had the phone number-that was inevitable. He'd get another phone, no big deal, but then what if they could somehow trace it or get to the house? But no, he told himself, that was crazy. He was safe. He was fine. Everything was fine.

Madison, five years old tomorrow and with the shrunken hungry bewitching face of an elf out of some fairy tale, let go of his hand suddenly and allowed herself to come down hard on the hard shining floor. He looked down at her in that moment as if he'd never seen her before, her eyes contracting with calculated hurt or sullenness, ready for bed-past ready for bed-and then he jerked his head up and scanned the place for Natalia.

William Wilson was thirty-four years old, a pizza genius and a clothes horse, and to his own mind at least, a ladies' man, though his last lady-the lady before Natalia-had given him a daughter of his own whom he loved till it hurt and then turned into a queen bitch and landed him in jail. He'd always hated the name his mother had imposed on him-William Jr. after his father, who was his own kind of trouble-and when he was in elementary school he felt a little grand about it and insisted that everybody call him William and not Bill or Billy, and then in junior high he saw how uncool that was and got a warm-up jacket with Will stitched across the breast in white piping, but that didn't seem to make it either. Will, William, Bill, Billy: it was all so ordinary, so pedestrian-or plebeian, one of his favorite words from history class, because if anybody was the opposite of plebeian, it was him, and Christ, how many William Wilsons were there in a country the size of the U. S.? Not to mention England. There must have been thousands of them there too. Hundreds of thousands. And what of all the Guillaumes and Wilhelms and Guillermos scattered round the world? By high school he'd adopted his mother's maiden name-Peck-and nobody dared call him anything else, because he was quick with his tongue and his hands and feet too, black belt at sixteen, and there was only one kid at school who even thought about fucking with him and that kid, Hanvy Richards, wound up with the bridge of his nose broken in three places. Peck Wilson, that was who he was, and he went to the community college and got his associate's degree and rose up the ladder from delivery boy to counterman to manager at Fiorentino's in his hometown of Peterskill, in northern Westchester, and he traveled too, to Maui and Stowe and Miami. He tried out women the way he tried out drinks and recipes, always eager, always exploring. By the time he was twenty-five he was flush.

Sure, then he met Gina, and it was all shit after that. Or no: to give her credit, because she had an awesome body and a pierced tongue that tasted of the clove cigarettes she smoked and could make him stand up straight just thinking about it, she took him on more of a shit-slide, a whole roller-coastering hold-your-breath-and-look-out plunge into a vast vat of shit and on shit-greased wheels too. But he didn't want to think about that now. He wanted to think about Natalia, the girl from Jaroslavl who never got enough of anything-the shopper extraordinaire, restaurant killer and bedroom champion-with the breathy bitten-off Russian accent that made him itch and itch again and her little daughter by the guy who brought her over and got her her papers, an older guy she never even liked let alone loved.